Photobucket thumbnails only - blocked by image proxy?

[TheButterZone]

Code:

[URL=http://smg.photobucket.com/user/baybones/media/serialized/2-1.jpg.html][IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v51/baybones/serialized/th_2-1.jpg[/img]

Code:

[img]http://rsmg.pbsrc.com/albums/v51/baybones/serialized/2-1.jpg~c100[/img]

[1714028391]

1714028391

[1714028391]

1714028391

[1714028391]

1714028391

[ForgottenPassword]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v51/baybones/serialized/th_2-1.jpg

That URL redirects to a HTML page for me, so it won't work. It needs to link to an image, not a page. I know the URL ends in .jpg, but photobucket redirects me to .jpg.html

[TheButterZone]

Suddenly TODAY Photobucket no longer works with exactly the same [img] tag format that it's had people copy for months, if not years.

[ForgottenPassword]

Suddenly TODAY Photobucket no longer works with exactly the same [img] tag format that it's had people copy for months, if not years.

Thats a real pitty if thats the case.

They don't make any ad revenue if people don't view the page. Each time someone views a hotlinked image they actually lose money due to bandwidth costs. Maybe they recently decided to disallow hotlinking because they were losing too much.

Something similar happened to ImageShack a long time ago. They decided to disallow hotlinking for a ton of images they were hosting, breaking them across the internet.

[TheButterZone]

Yeah but the whole point of putting out thumbnails is they drive traffic to Photobucket.com instead of just having hotlink bandwidth wasted.

[TheButterZone]

I submitted a ticket to their Zendesk and referenced this topic.

[ForgottenPassword]

AHA! The thumbnail does not work, but the fullsize one does.

Code:

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v51/baybones/serialized/th_2-1.jpg[/img]

Code:

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v51/baybones/serialized/2-1.jpg[/img]

[TheButterZone]

Ridic...

[TheButterZone]

It appears that it's an issue only with bitcointalk's image proxy. http://scandiego.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1748 shows PB thumbnails fine.

Should I just change all my BBcode thumbnails to hotlinked originals until bitcointalk is fixed?

[theymos]

It's not a problem with the image proxy. The pages behave differently depending on whether you have a photobucket cookie or not. Maybe the referrer also matters. In any case, photobucket gives you an image, but it gives the forum an HTML page.

Try going directly to the URL of one of those thumnails in a separate browser.

[poisenrang]

upload the picture to www.imgur.com then get the URL put it as [IMG]http://URL[/img]

[TheButterZone]

I'm not uploading 200-300 pics to imgur just to have that go down too. Have you seen how unreliable imgur is? This is the first blemish on Photobucket's long track record I can remember.

[dree12]

It's not a problem with the image proxy. The pages behave differently depending on whether you have a photobucket cookie or not. Maybe the referrer also matters. In any case, photobucket gives you an image, but it gives the forum an HTML page.

Try going directly to the URL of one of those thumnails in a separate browser.

This can be fixed by having the forum image proxy send the proper cookie to photobucket.

[theymos]

This can be fixed by having the forum image proxy send the proper cookie to photobucket.

If adding a specific cookie will fix it, tell me what the cookie is and I'll add it. It'd be too difficult to have the image proxy do something like stay logged into photobucket, though.

I didn't investigate enough to know exactly what causes the page to behave differently. But when I visit some of those thumbnail images in my main browser, I get an image, and when I open a new browser and visit the same URL directly, I get an HTML page.

[ForgottenPassword]

This can be fixed by having the forum image proxy send the proper cookie to photobucket.

If adding a specific cookie will fix it, tell me what the cookie is and I'll add it. It'd be too difficult to have the image proxy do something like stay logged into photobucket, though.

I didn't investigate enough to know exactly what causes the page to behave differently. But when I visit some of those thumbnail images in my main browser, I get an image, and when I open a new browser and visit the same URL directly, I get an HTML page.

The link always redirects to a html page with my browser (firefox), though I do have an addon that blocks tracking/third party cookies.

[TheButterZone]

I guess I need to build an army of Photobucket users to all submit a separate ticket at http://support.photobucket.com/hc/en-us

No response to my ticket since Last Tuesday at 08:57.

[dree12]

This can be fixed by having the forum image proxy send the proper cookie to photobucket.

If adding a specific cookie will fix it, tell me what the cookie is and I'll add it. It'd be too difficult to have the image proxy do something like stay logged into photobucket, though.

I didn't investigate enough to know exactly what causes the page to behave differently. But when I visit some of those thumbnail images in my main browser, I get an image, and when I open a new browser and visit the same URL directly, I get an HTML page.

This seems to work for me (I get a image/jpg [sic—the correct MIME type is image/jpeg], not a text/html):

Code:

GET /albums/v51/baybones/serialized/th_2-1.jpg HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Wget/1.15 (linux-gnu)
Accept: */*
Host: img.photobucket.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

These are the default Wget headers.

Edit:

These very similar headers cease to work, getting a 302 Found response and thus a text/html page.

Code:

GET /albums/v51/baybones/serialized/th_2-1.jpg HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0
Accept: text/html,*/*
Host: img.photobucket.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

Oddly, changing both the user agent and Accept header seem to be necessary.

It seems the easiest way to fix this issue is to refuse sending the "Accept: text/html" header, or alternatively spoof the user agent so that it is not understood. It is possible browsers do not send this when hotlinking, hence there are no issues on other forums.

Indeed, my browser sends "Accept: image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5" on other forums. So this change is easier than expected; simply change the Accept header sent. There is also no need to special-case PhotoBucket, as the image proxy should not be accepting text/html anyways, for any server.

[TheButterZone]

   
Danny (Photobucket Support)
Aug 09 10:28 AM

Hi,

It does appear that the issue lies on their end, as our code shouldn't cause any images to display that way when linking them out. It seems specific to that forum.

If I had to venture a guess, it would be that the forum has issues with the redirect for the thumbnail image ( the img to smg change). Unfortunately, that isn't something that can fixed on our end, as there is no current plan to stop images from redirecting back to the site.

It sometimes displays just the thumbnail, and redirects to the media detail page at others. I don't know why that functionality is that way with thumbnails linked out, and I'll have our engineers look into that further.

Thank you,

Posted From bitcointalk.org Android App

[dree12]

   
Danny (Photobucket Support)
Aug 09 10:28 AM

Hi,

It does appear that the issue lies on their end, as our code shouldn't cause any images to display that way when linking them out. It seems specific to that forum.

If I had to venture a guess, it would be that the forum has issues with the redirect for the thumbnail image ( the img to smg change). Unfortunately, that isn't something that can fixed on our end, as there is no current plan to stop images from redirecting back to the site.

It sometimes displays just the thumbnail, and redirects to the media detail page at others. I don't know why that functionality is that way with thumbnails linked out, and I'll have our engineers look into that further.

Thank you,

Posted From bitcointalk.org Android App

Code:

Accept: text/html

is the culprit; see my post above. This should be a fairly easy change to the image proxy.

[BTCreward]

I guess I need to build an army of Photobucket users to all submit a separate ticket at http://support.photobucket.com/hc/en-us

No response to my ticket since Last Tuesday at 08:57.

If you go to the .jpg page (actually .html) and right click on the image you should be able to get the link to the actual image. This is just a way for them to get more ad revenue as when you link just the image they will not get any ad impressions (revenue).